


ain't no mountain high enough

by trash_rendar



Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Friendship, Gen, M35 Mako, N7 Day, gender neutral pronouns for shepard, shepard drives like crazy, smothering Best Girl in love and affection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-07
Updated: 2020-11-07
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:06:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27436303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trash_rendar/pseuds/trash_rendar
Summary: A tribute to the Systems Alliance M35 Mako IFV, and the friendships we made with it.Written for N7 Day 2020.
Relationships: Shepard & Garrus Vakarian & Tali'Zorah nar Rayyah
Kudos: 2





	ain't no mountain high enough

Life, so the saying goes, is about the journey and not the destination. From what Tali’Zorah understood it was supposed to reflect deep wisdom of living in the moment and appreciating the beauty of the ‘now’.

She is convinced whoever came up with that saying never sat in a Mako, with Shepard behind the wheel.

The Geth’s flashlight-bulb shatters as its head is violently dashed against the vehicle’s armored canopy; through the hull, she can hear its outer shell _crunch_ as its platform body falls beneath the rover’s wheels, ground into its own synthetic muscle against tire and regolith.

“ _Spirits_ , Shepard,” Garrus yelps as their commander’s latest act of vehicular homicide unfolds. He jerks his feet away from the polarized canopy, curling his toes on instinct where milky circulation fluid stains the windshield. “You don’t have to run over _every_ hostile!”

The Spectre laughs, jerking the the Mako into a sharp bank up a climbing hillock and, incidentally, almost throwing Tali from her cockpit seat. “You can’t tell me you’re not having fun, Vakarian.”

“Sure I am,” he says, dubiously. “Just – just slow down once in awhile so I can actually shoot!”

Tali has to crane her neck and lean precariously far out of her seat to point over Garrus’s shoulder. “Armature!” she cries, emphatically stabbing the air with her finger. “Armature at three o’clock!”

“I see it-- Shepard, wait--!”

“I’m moving, I’m moving!”

The first plasma pulse misses by a head and shoulders. The second strikes the craft in its waist, rocking the cabin with a _bang_ and causing something to make unkind sounds somewhere in the troop cabin.

“Barriers are down! Armor’s buckling--!”

“Main cannon not responding!” Shepard jerks a thumb over their shoulder; the terrain outside the canopy is a whirling, slug-spackled blur. “I need you back there, Tali!”

She’s already shrugging off her crash harness by the time she gasps, “On it,” and staggers through the narrow cockpit hatch.

The Armature’s siege cannon cut smoothly through their barriers, striking the hull with much less grace. There are no obvious breakages in the hull or environmental seals, thankfully, but a power trunk overloaded under the strain, bursting into a shower of flame and debris; it continues to burn and spark as another plasma bolt strikes the Mako on the cheek and throws Tali bodily off her feet; she bites down on a whine as she hits the jaw of her helmet on the edge of an infantry seat. The heels of her palms go skidding through soot and broken ceramic plating as she lands. The cabin stinks of burning ozone through her olfactory filters.

There’s a fire suppression device mounted under the seat she brained herself on, she notices dazedly. Her gloved fingers fumble with the fasteners on autopilot; by the time she points the extinguisher nozzle at the flame, she’s come to her senses.

Outside, the coaxial machine gun is rattling a frantic battery of rounds at the foe. Shepard and Garrus are calling out targets to each other in the cockpit. The fire drowns slowly under a deluge of foam – too slowly. The Geth are attacking. Saren is coming. The Reapers are coming. Every second counts.

When the blaze is nothing but embers burning at the ends of frayed wires, Tali flicks open her omni-tool and braces herself against the broken trunk casing as the deck shifts precariously under the soles of her feet. It continues to tilt, tilt, tilt as she pumps omni-gel into every crack and breakage she can find; it’s not really, she knows, the Mako’s internal gravity remains consistent no matter its physical orientation, but her stomach still does flip after flip as she scrambles to repair the damage.

A short jumps from the electrical conduit into the finger of her glove as she completes the last circuit; it gives her a painful jolt and cause to yelp, but it also sets the hull thrumming in a way her quarian ears find incredibly reassuring.

“We’re back online,” she calls, just as the mass driver starts to roar.

* * *

By the time she finishes patching up, it’s already over; the Armature, the rest of the Geth garrison and, by extension, the outpost are exploding behind them. Garrus and Shepard are celebrating with a whoop and something Shepard calls a ‘fist-bump’. Somehow, the Mako is sitting with its canopy facing the sky straight-on, perching on a mountain peak and tilted at a precariously steep angle.

This comes as no surprise to Tali. This is not her first ride with Shepard in the driver’s seat.

“Scopes are clean of enemy contacts,” Garrus announces with a smile, ducking through the hatchway. He adds offhandedly, “Missed a lot of exciting stuff back there, Tali. Some real skillful shooting, if I say so myself. Wish you could’ve seen it.”

“That’s fine,” she replies half-heartedly from the infantry bench. “I don’t think I would’ve enjoyed it anyway.”

He glances at her once – twice, his brows furrowing against his facial plates. “Hey,” he says, dropping onto the seat beside her. “You alright there?”

She only notices she’s been cradling her jolted wrist after he does. “Oh, this is nothing,” she says flippantly, turning and rolling her hand. “Just got a little shock putting the Mako back together. I’ll be fine.” It’s not exactly _nothing_ , of course, since the outermost lining of her suit is slightly singed and torn and her forearm is still buzzing in a curious way, but Keelah, it’s not like it’ll _kill_ her.

“You sure? You still seem a little out of it.” His smooth, flanging voice suddenly full of care. It almost takes her aback.

“Uh. I-- also may have bumped my head back there. But that’s it, really.”

“You sure you don’t need medi-gel? We’ve got plenty.”

“No, no – nothing’s broken or bleeding. And I’m pretty sure I don’t have a concussion.” Her suit told her so, after all, and she believes it – after all, she installed that biometric processor herself – and yet being caught in the sights of her fellow squadmate makes her lose confidence, somehow. Garrus especially is a hard sell in times like these, scrutinizing her with one eye framed perfectly in the lens of his visor like a jeweler’s loupe.

“I’m fine,” Tali insists. “Really.”

“Well,” he says. “As long as you’re okay.” And for a moment, she hopes that’ll be the end of it.

But Garrus isn’t quite so trusting.

“We should at least get _this_ taken care of,” he rumbles as he takes hold of her damaged glove (her hand along with it) and runs his omni-tool over the gashes. Before her eyes, threads of hardlight begin stitching the fabric back together with pinpricks of omni-gel, sealing the cracks and leaving white seams in their place.

“Oh, _honestly_ , Garrus—"

“You quarians could die from a suit breach, right? Let’s just get this patched up.”

“Keelah, I’m not going to just _drop dead_ ,” she protests. “It doesn’t work like that.”

Shepard picks the worst possible time to walk in. “Everything okay in here?”

“It’s all good,” Garrus replies, smirking. “Miss Fix-It here is just being fussy about her suit.”

(“I’m not _fussy_ \--!” )

“You told me yourself infections from suit damage could be life-threatening, no matter how small,” Shepard points out sternly. “I’m not losing any of my people to a head cold.”

“I was going to patch it anyway!” Tali groans and pulls her hand out of Garrus’s grasp, perhaps a bit more roughly than she meant. “Just – just stop _worrying_ about me so much, all right? _Both_ of you. I-I’m not so fragile that I’ll break without your pity.”

Keelah Se’lai, now they’re both looking at her again. At least they don’t seem upset – more confused and sad. It’s a strange – what was that word Joker used? A ‘weird vibe’. Strange and unfamiliar.

Garrus, in particular, has fixed her with that flinty policeman’s gaze that she’s become uncannily familiar with during her pilgrimage. And yet there’s something different about it this time – there’s some other emotion sitting just behind the eyes where there should be cold indifference. Something… softer. But that can’t be right. Joker said it best when he said Garrus had a real stick up his—

“Spirits, Tali, I’m sorry,” he sighs. “I didn’t mean to – I mean, it wasn’t – ah, hell.” His head dips into the bowl of his cowl. “I’m just trying to look out for you.”

“We all are, Tali,” Shepard adds. Their hand comes to rest on her shoulder. “You’re part of the _Normandy_ too, you know.”

‘Part of the _Normandy_.’ The idea is like a pin pricking a balloon; Tali feels something give in the agitation that was wound up so tightly inside her, senses it slowly leaking out second by second despite herself.

Shepard isn’t quarian. They can’t possibly know what they’re suggesting, what they’re implying, when they say something like that.

“I know,” she says, carefully. “It’s just – it’s not that I’m ungrateful or that I don’t want to be here, because I’m not – it’s just, well. I don’t want you all to feel like you have to keep picking up after me.

“I mean, let’s face it,” she adds as Garrus starts to open his mouth. “I’m not exactly one of the Migrant Fleet Marines. I don’t really have any formal military training at all. I just – happened to have the data the Council needed to hear, and Shepard just happened to take me on board.” Her voice gives out for a moment as she gestures vaguely. “And now I’m in a tank, hunting a rogue Spectre, fighting geth and krogan and who knows what else, and I – I still can’t really believe I’m really out here doing this. Or that I _should_ be.”

For the first time she can remember, Shepard looks oddly stricken. “What are you saying here, Tali?”

“Just that I know there are much better options out there for shore team,” she replies. “And that – well, it’s like the Fleet. We all have to pull our own weight out here. So don’t think I’m not trying.”

Naively, she expects silence. A beat of silence always follows a soul-baring confession. It’s one of those implicit rules of drama, like in _Fleet and Flotilla_ when Bellicus and Shalei finally confess their love.

Instead, Garrus’s nostrils flare, air rushing out through them in a distinctly skeptical way. “You sure you didn’t hit your head too hard? ‘cause you seem pretty confused right now.”

“What do you mean?”

“I just don’t know how you can possibly think you’ve got anything to prove to us. You’re a great mechanic, fantastic with electronics, a good hand with a shotgun – hell, you literally just saved the Mako. Not to mention that without you keeping yourself alive, we’d have no clue how to stop Saren in the first place. That’s not nothing, Tali. That’s more than _most_ people could do, actually.”

Garrus is a strange turian, and theirs is an odd connection. He’s cocky, vengeful, and occasionally bigoted; moreover, he’s a cop on the Citadel, where running off ‘loitering’ quarians is almost a beat unto itself. Even before being recruited, the odds were very much against their coming together as a team, much less as people. She isn’t really prepared to hear affection in his voice when he talks about her.

“So no, I don’t think any of us think you’re not qualified to be here. And I’m sorry if it looks like we’re trying to babysit you, but we’re not. We all know you know how to take care of yourself. But in the field, we’re still gonna look after our own.”

“Garrus is right,” Shepard says. “You wouldn’t be on this team if I didn’t think you were up to it. And we wouldn’t be a team if we didn’t look after one another out here.”

“I get that,” Tali interrupts, thickly. “I just – it’s _different_ with me, for some reason. I don’t know why, it could be because I’m quarian, because I’m not formal military, or – or what, but it’s _different_. I can _feel_ it. I just – “

Oh, Keelah, she’s sniffling now. How pathetic.

“I just don’t get it.”

Shepard and Vakarian exchange glances, and Tali frets over whatever unspoken sentiment they could be sharing. Then Shepard’s hand leaves her shoulder, coming down to twine its fingers in her own through its unblemished glove. It’s a gesture that says _eyes up_ , that fascinating phrase that til now she had only associated from the peculiar vernacular of the Marines - of her father - but also _you’re not alone_ , which she had not.

“It’s like I told you before, Tali.” There’s something about Shepard’s voice – those stolid, commanding tones. “You’re part of the _Normandy_ now.”

Garrus chuckles softly. His subvocals rumble comfortingly against the baritone of his voice as he takes Tali’s other, glove, patched where it’d been broken, in his. “Like the quarian little sister I never knew I wanted.”

She must steady herself, gulp down a breath, before she can reply. They give her time.

“Thank you,” she whispers. “Thank you both.”

“What are friends for,” the turian says, cracking a grin.

* * *

“Base is wiped out, mission accomplished, Normandy is homing in on us – Everybody strapped in?”

“Micro-boosters still reading nominal after repair,” Tali says, tapping at her omni-tool. “But I would take it easy on the ascent anyway.”

“Yeah, try not to hit anything on the way _up_ this time,” Garrus teases.

There’s a smile in Shepard’s voice the next time they speak, and Tali isn’t sure she likes it. “We’re not going to need the boosters.”

“We aren’t?”

“Not if we’re fast enough.”

Tali pokes her head over the shoulder of Garrus’s seat, peering through the canopy. She notes the steepness of the mountain slope, angled as if stretching up into the horizon of sky before dropping off into empty space, and comes to a realization. She throws on another layer of crash webbing as quickly as her arms will let her.

This is not her first ride with Shepard in the driver’s seat.

“Shepard.” Garrus’s voice is winding up in a distinctly strangled way. Through the bulkheads, they can all hear the Mako’s engine revving up, the grinding of wheels straining against their handbrake. “Shepard, this isn’t going to work. It’s just not gonna work. Shepard? _Shepard_ \---!”

“C’mon, guys. Where’s your sense of adventure?”

Indifferent to the worries of its passengers, the Mako motors up the mountainside to the peak and finally to the invisible free-hanging nothing beyond, launching itself recklessly into the aether.


End file.
